


can your heart rate rise a little

by fruitwhirl



Series: let the soft animal of your body love what it loves [2]
Category: Brooklyn Nine-Nine (TV)
Genre: F/M, more in the chuck au, pining and showers
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-12-09
Updated: 2017-12-09
Packaged: 2019-02-12 11:30:25
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,650
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12958260
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/fruitwhirl/pseuds/fruitwhirl
Summary: Jake Peralta has a girlfriend and doesn't know where he stands with his CIA handler, Amy Santiago. The air-vents and mysterious powder don't help the matter.





	can your heart rate rise a little

**Author's Note:**

> listen i'm well aware that i used sophia in the role of lou earlier. but i forgot that chuck also dated chill who was more Relevant and needed another female character that jake dated, so here we go. 
> 
> and okay listen....i know this is another line from the same dodie song..."would you be so kind." don't judge, dodie's got some good lyrics.

Jake forgot what it was like to have, like, a _real_ girlfriend. He’s gotten used to the perfunctory pecks and other general public displays of affection he and Amy do to keep up the façade that she’s his girlfriend and not actually his badass CIA handler. But he finds that he missed the casual interactions he could have with Sophia back at NYU, where he could be open and honest about their relationship (even if she was sleeping with his best friend the entire time, at least she told him; after Amy kissed him, Jake still doesn’t know where her feelings stand in regards to him, aside from the fact that she pauses, stiffens just a little, anytime the attractive defense attorney is brought up in conversation). He doesn’t think that he forgives her fully, at least not yet, but he does know that he feels a bit lighter when she’s around.

And what sucks is that he and Amy have to continue their fake relationship (although she doesn’t try to kiss him nearly as much anymore, especially with the lawyer around) and he _knows_ how insecure Sophia is around her, even though she’s completely aware of the situation (even though he _knows_ that Amy is similarly, if not more, apprehensive around the other woman) she’s still sure that the pair at least _slept_ together at one point, which has definitely not happened. Amy normally tries to slip out as inconspicuously as she can when the shorter Latina arrives, but for a trained spy, she tends to just nervously blurt out some random excuse that doesn’t make sense half the time and then bolt the other direction. Rosa, in her green and yellow _Nine-Nine_ polo, rolls her eyes every time the two women make contact.

His first mistake, of course, is syncing his phone with the watch the NSA gave him.

Really, a rookie mistake.

Jake, Amy, and Rosa enter _The Pierre,_ a luxurious hotel located on 5th Avenue, under the guise of a businessman, his promiscuously dressed escort—her red silk dress nearly killed him—and a bell-girl, respectively. He isn’t sure what the female version of a bell-boy is called, and he isn’t entirely sure why his go-to alias, a high-powered financial advisor named Jerry McClane, would even _need_ an escort, because for reals, who still uses escorts nowadays other than supervillains in movies (as he learns, it’s actually quite a fair number of politicians).

Once in the hotel room booked and paid for by NSA general Holt—Jake told him during the video-chat to expect to see a multitude of charges for gummy worms on the tab, only to receive a blank look and stern: “No, I will not”—he and Amy change into their standard black pants and shirts, and crawl into the air-ducts above, moving along on their elbows and knees to the their target, while making an awful amount of grunting noises because _shit,_ ventilation systems must have gotten smaller since last month.

“ _Fuck_ , Santiago, I don’t remember it being this tight,” he says, voice straining and a little breathy.

He can practically hear Amy roll her eyes ahead of him. “Just move your hips a little—no, angle them _that_ way—no, no, the _other_ way.”

“I swear it’s harder than it was last time we did this,” Jake grumbles, trying to press his feet against the metal of the vent.

“You know—” _grunt. “_ —the shaft is actually bigger than I thought it would be.”

_“Really?”_

Absentmindedly, he hears his watch beep three times, but he dismisses it because man, it is _hot_ in here. Eventually, they make their way to the ex-CIA agent McGintley’s hotel room, and Amy drops onto the bed, the mattress bouncing slightly under her sudden weight, with Jake following soon after (and landing much less gracefully) as she slides off to pad around the carpet in search of the box that is supposed to contain a list of Fulcrum double-agents.

“What exactly are we looking for?” Jake asks as he shuffles through one of the cabinets.

Amy hums, over by the closet. “Anything that has some kind of lock on it. It could be a tube or something other than a box.”

“Maybe just a random piece of paper?” Another _hmm._

It’s a few moments later of methodical searching before she speaks up again. And the question she poses is soft, hesitant. “I heard your watch go off while we were in the vents. Did you call someone?”

“Not that I can re- _call._ ” He hears her groan. “I’m not sorry—you walked right into that one.”

Later, of course, he’ll figure out that he called his current girlfriend while it sounded like he and his fake girlfriend were having sex, when in fact they were doing the opposite: crawling through cobwebs and literally inhaling dust—not exactly what he would consider an erotic experience.

After roughly six minutes, he’s in the bathroom and suddenly there’s an enthusiastic _“Aha!”_ and he runs back into the room to find Amy lying on the floor. Or, well, _half_ of Amy, as her torso and head are underneath the California King mattress. Soon, she extricates herself from the crawlspace, sitting up on her knees, proudly displaying a rather ornate—

 

 

_“Music box?”_

Rosa crosses her arms, one eyebrow raised as she appraises it from afar.

Really, it’s about the length of his hand when he spreads out his fingers, with gold trim along the edge and Roman numerals on the top of it. Jake shakes his head. “No, it looks like a music box, but it’s actually just a fancy lockbox with a special Fibonacci sequence required to open it, which can only be achieved by—”

“Just open it already, Peralta,” Amy grumbles from his side.

He concedes, moving the tiles in a whirlwind before hearing a satisfying _click,_ and the box pops open, only for it to be devoid of any paper and contain only what looks to be some kind of speaker? He doesn’t get a chance to wonder too much about it, because all of the sudden out of the tiny holes puff a white cloud of powder and—holy shit holy shit holy shit—it’s _all_ over Amy and him. The former yells at Rosa to leave _now_ and get the containment team while simultaneously stripping off her clothes, screaming at Jake to do the same, even helping him lift his shirt over his head and unbuckle his belt because they need to get into a shower, _stat._

Frantically, they stumble over to the bathroom in their underwear as articles of clothing drop to the floor, climb into the stall and Amy doesn’t waste any time figuring out the shower settings and immediately they start washing themselves and each other. The hotel bar soap sucks but it’ll do, and the water is steaming hot and Jake is like seventy percent sure they’re going to die.

But after the initial panic dies down, when Jake’s washing her back, he’s suddenly struck with just how _intimate_ this all feels. In that moment, he realizes that he’s never seen her so vulnerable, both physically and emotionally, he thinks—she’s always been the one with a plan, never shown her fear. His hands run over the smooth, wet skin, and Amy’s turning around, toward him, and the look on her face is not one of disgust or anger at his touch but something different, something unsure but curious.

It’s then, of course, that there’s a knock on the door and Amy seems to snap out of it, barking at him to grab a towel and answer the door, because _it could be Rosa with the hazmat team, there’s no time to waste._

However, he opens the door to neither a tall, surly NSA agent nor some guy in a yellow hazmat soon, but instead to a short brunette with a look of bemusement on her face. “Jake, about that call—”

She stops mid-sentence, her eyes trained on something behind him. His heart falls to his stomach when he sees Amy standing there, wringing out her hair while still in her lace bra and underwear, and he’s suddenly aware of his current state of undress as well. Sophia looks equal parts devastated and irate.

“I can’t believe I was right,” she spits at him. “God, I _knew_ you were sleeping with her.”

And the she turns on her heel before he can even register it and clip-clops down the hallway, and he’s shouting after her, with Amy talking quietly in the background. When he resigns to the fact that Sophia won’t come back to him, he turns to his handler again, and she’s just finishing a call with someone who sounds important. Just like she always does when she’s anxious, she’s biting her lip and clutching her arms to her chest as an act of self-preservation.

“The containment team will be here any minute,” she says. Then her expression is soft, careful. “I can explain to her what happened, or-or—what didn’t happen. If you want?”

Jake shakes his head, electing instead to sit on the other, uncontaminated bed. Amy sighs as she pulls on a shirt she must have stowed in her backpack. “Stay here, I’ll find you something to wear until Rosa gets back.”

“Yeah, okay.”

Later, Rosa will return with a whole army of hazmat suits, and they’ll find out that the mysterious powder was just strawberry Kool-Aid mix, and that he potentially lost his girlfriend that he just started dating again. Later, he’ll lie with the aforementioned woman in his arms once she forgives him (he suspects it has something to do with Amy reaching out), and wonder if he should have let her go. And later, he’ll feel his small handler’s arm brush against the bare skin of his forearm, and a jolt will spark his nerves.

 

**Author's Note:**

> let me know if you enjoyed & if you'd like to read more from this universe!


End file.
